Sigmund Freud

1856 - 1939



Freud began his medical career in 1885 with an apprenticeship to Charcot in Paris.

Returning to Vienna he colaborated with Josef Breuer on the use of hypnosis in the treatment of hysteria.

Their paper on the "physical mechanism of hysterical penomena" in 1893 saw he beginning of psychoanalysis.

Symptoms of hysterical patients are directly traceable to psychic trauma in earlier life and represent undischarged emotional energy.

The Cathartic method had the patient recall and reproduce forgotten scenes whilst under hypnosis.

The work was poorly received by the medical profession, and the two men separated over Freud's growing conviction that the undefined energy was sexual in nature.

Freud then rejected hypnosis and devised a technique called free association allowing emotionally charged material that the individual had repressed in the unconscious mind to emerge to conscious recognition.